


The Watcher in Darkness

by Notaricon



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening
Genre: Androgynous Architect, Androgyny, Body Worship, Character Study, Drabble, No Dialogue, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Obsession, Other, Unrequited Lust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-12
Updated: 2011-04-12
Packaged: 2017-10-17 23:59:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notaricon/pseuds/Notaricon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He can end it. End it all. This, she knows. She knows it with a certainty as cold and patient as stone.</i>
</p><p>She watches. She remembers. She understands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Watcher in Darkness

She is his silent observer in dark, idle moments. Idle hours, of which there are too many.

The drifting grit and brimstone reek of the Deep Roads carries with it a heavy, buzzing silence; the thrum of throbbing masses just beyond the ancient stone doors of the Architect’s sanctum (which she haunts, day by day by day, until time thickens and clumps and ceases to flow as it should). The stench and ghost-taste of charnel-house slop is a thin but ever-present slime in her tongueless mouth; even here, in the hushed shadows of this one clean place.

And he is here, always. She wonders at his stillness, when there is so much yet to do. So much yet left undone. Though he has spoken his frustration to her, she has yet to see it in his face. His slender, withered hands are diligent and forever in motion above the pages of his journals, or the smudged notes he keeps in the blank columns of his foundling books (which she will never touch again, because she hates and loves the quiet way his body tightens when her fingers brush their crackled spines).

He can end it. End it all. This, she knows. She knows it with a certainty as cold and patient as stone.

And so she devotes herself to his cause; so she devotes herself to him. To the study of him; of his goals, his words, the ripples and rills in his corrupted flesh. She has long since memorized the patterns of his breath, which comes strangely thick and wet and ever-more laboured the longer he speaks (to himself, to the walls, to countless words on countless rustling pages – even, sometimes, to her). She considers the lisping sibilance of syllables, each unto itself, of its own meaning beneath the whole of them. She considers his skin, fists beneath her chin, mouth pressed firmly shut, sitting atop the old Dwarven stool across from his great, stone desk. He writes. He is often writing. The raw mechanism driving the movement of his fingers hushes the air, she thinks. Even the heavy veins of the earth speak in dull whispers here. In the silence, she considers, and she remembers.

They had walked side by side. The murky undersea light of her glowstone had caught and flickered in the cold underground damp which slicked the stone walls. The air had smelled of wet and foulness and the chill stink of fungus and slimy, hanging lichens. And she had watched him then, as well; watched as he walked, weirdly regal in his threadbare robes. They had been brilliantly coloured, once, she was certain; though long since gone a mottled translucent gray with the wet and wear and time. Beneath them, the long shadows marking the divots of his belly and hips, of the gap between his thighs, snaked and slithered as he moved, bunching like curled fingers at the sunken arch of his ribs and along the shifting column of his spine.

She had stopped. She had touched. Touched the cool shadows pooling at the hollow of his back, where the thin, moist cotton stuck to her fingers. Followed the knots of bone beneath the cloth, the corded angles that tied the sacral grooves to the fragile flare of the pelvis. Counted the weak points under her fingertips; here, a thin shelf of bone, and there, a joint easily severed by but a jerk of a strong hand held taut and flat. She had touched and traced and felt the slow, thick pulse of tainted ichors beneath his scarred, dry skin. This was not a man. A man would bleed, were she to wound him. But she liked the rasp of cloth against his flesh, which spoke every bit as eloquently as his twisted mouth. Eloquent and ugly and strange.

In that moment, he had watched her, head canted inquisitively to the side, silent, with spiderling hands neatly folded atop his belly. Half-blindly, she had counted the soft trenches between his ribs, dipping her fingers into the hasp of his bared shoulder, when his cobweb robes slithered to bunch and pool at his waist. When she gripped his frail thighs and pressed her peeling lips to the worn muslin gathered at his hip, he merely placed a thin hand atop her head, quietly compliant, observant, inhuman and inquisitive. He had smelled of tar and smoke and bitter inks. As her mouth closed, hot and silent and wanting, over the soft swell between his legs, she had wondered if he would taste of those things, as well.

Utha remembers. She remembers and watches from her place, crouched in the dark; and when he lifts his head from his notes, his expression all the more alien for the way it resembles a smile, she knows he does not — will never — understand.


End file.
